Sometimes, even when (especially when?) I’m exhausted, work-overloaded, multi-tasking, dreaming in a million different directions, I am just struck by the sheer beauty around me.

Washington in the springtime (and the fall, and DEFINITELY Xmas, and heck even summer… sometimes… in the evenings) is just mesmerizing beautiful, in a way that cannot fail to fill one’s heart with joy, however fleeting.

In fact, it’s my favorite type of awe – the one that is found among the ordinary. A journalism professor teaching a class to a group of high school journalists in “summer camp” (yah, I was that kid) told a group of us part of the role of the journalist is to “make the ordinary extraordinary.” Life can do that sometimes.

Question/Thought/ Prompt: What are the moments / sights/ experiences that turn ordinary into extraordinary for you? That cheer you from gloom, inspire or afflict you? Post a comment and/or write /show me on your blog (just be sure to come back and tell me about it.)

2 Comments

tstockley said,

That is a beautiful picture, and one of my favorite all-time sights, as well.

Others include:

Being in Edinburgh, Scotland, one week in April and literally watching it turn from winter to spring. When I arrived on Saturday, fog and rain and gloom. By Friday, bright sunshine and flowers and trees in bloom.

A very hot August afternoon at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, as I walked my sun-baked brain along the boardwalk back to the beach house, seeing at least a hundred dolphins undulating in a seemingly-endless line very close to shore.

Park Avenue, Rochester, in May.

And finally, I know every road and turn from the Massachusetts border to my grandparents’ house in Nashua, NH. At each intersection, I became more and more excited until I would literally explode out of the car when we were in the driveway. Although it has been years, I think I could drive through Nashua today and still recapture that child-like feeling of utter joy.

WW says: Thanks tstockley! this is lovely — you paint a wonderful picture of each of these sites. cutting tulips from the yard; that’s another one of mine.